Kraken (Pirates of The Caribbean) - Film Production

Film Production

The Kraken was difficult to animate as it had no real-life reference, until animation director Hal Hickel instructed the crew to watch King Kong vs. Godzilla which had a real octopus crawling over miniatures. During the filming of the attacks, Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann) divulged that "the Kraken, at the moment, is just Gore running around, going, 'I'm a tentacle. I'm a tentacle. Be afraid.'" Gore Verbinski worked with Industrial Light & Magic to create the scenes for the film involving the Kraken. When filming the attack on the Edinburgh Trader, they used the ship as a set in shallow waters. Many more sailors were digitally added on board the ship, and others were digitally replaced for complex shots. When the time came to film the Edinburgh Trader being broken in half, two massive pipes were filled with 30,000 pounds of cement for a total of 60,000 pounds and crushed down onto the set. To prepare for this event, most metal and the masts were removed, because the metal would prevent the ship from satisfyingly breaking in half while the masts would prevent better camera close-ups. Furthermore, the interior middle of the ship was lined with cables of explosives to blast the wood apart in the air. After the shot, other men were filmed on another blue tilting set and digitally added on deck. John Knoll, Visual Effects Supervisor, confessed that it was extremely complex to add the Kraken's tentacles between all the environmental effects of water and wood debris.

When the time came to film Jack Sparrow in front of the Kraken's maw, Johnny Depp's stand-in, Scott Sener, was used to experiment with what worked best with the slime at their disposal (which would represent the phlegm of the Kraken). The slime was spattered about him with jets of air. For the actual filming, Depp was spattered with the slime and acted his part without any representation for the Kraken. It was afterward digitally added along with sound, tentacles, and other visual effects.